Category: Industry News

Amazon’s grip on the U.S. economy has perhaps never been greater than now. In 2020, the online retail giant capitalized on the massive uptick in demand for online shopping—seeing its sales skyrocket by 39 percent. Meanwhile, CEO Jeff Bezos is now worth $200 billion.

But all of this growth has a dark side. A new report released Tuesday by the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of some of the country’s biggest labor unions, whose findings were confirmed in a separate analysis by the Washington Post, indicates that Amazon’s obsession with efficiency and customer satisfaction has come at a steep cost to the workers who fulfill and deliver orders to Amazon customers: rampant and severe workplace injuries.

In 2020, Amazon workers were severely injured more than 24,000 times, at twice the rate of the rest of the warehouse industry nationwide, according to federal data analyzed in the report.

The report, which analyzes data submitted by Amazon to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) between 2017 and 2020, found that Amazon significantly outpaces its biggest competitors in terms of workplace injuries, including Walmart and UPS.

Part of the Biden administration’s new strategy on allocating COVID-19 vaccines targets rural communities, which have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. In line with that goal as well as the imperative to speed vaccines to remote areas worldwide, major carriers have adopted innovative approaches to ensure that people don’t have to travel far to get the vaccine from a trusted source.

Since late last year, UPS and FedEx have made major adjustments to get COVID-19 vaccines in the hands of remote medical workers both domestically and globally.

Timing is everything

Ironically, a couple months before the pandemic exploded, UPS started a separate division, UPS Healthcare. It launched in January 2020. The goal was to focus on complex medical products like vaccines, as well as many others. Then the pandemic hit the U.S. hard that spring.

“We had this major disruption. So most of our attention was taking our resources and focusing on testing,” Dan Gagnon, vice president of global healthcare strategy and marketing at UPS, told FreightWaves. “We were helping the federal government set up national test sites, and we were helping states set up their COVID testing sites. We put up the tents, we’d get the kits to them, we’d collect the samples and bring them back to the labs.”

The 1.2 million member International Brotherhood of Teamsters is one of the largest and most powerful unions in the U.S., with a vast marble headquarters and billions in pension fund assets. But there have been internal conflicts with the union, including over a controversial 2018 contract with UPS that was implemented despite the membership’s majority “no” vote. Now, in the lead-up to the November election to determine the next Teamsters president, that UPS contract is once again taking center stage.

While the two candidates vying for the presidency have pledged to remove a rule that allows union leadership to implement contracts in certain circumstances against the will of the membership, only one of the candidates, Boston Teamster leader Sean O’Brien, has the track record of opposing the 2018 UPS contract that is the case study for those seeking the rule change. The other candidate, Colorado Teamster leader Steve Vairma, is seen as more closely aligned with outgoing President James Hoffa and was notably silent as a majority of voting UPS members opposed the 2018 contract.

That UPS contract, which 54 percent of UPS Teamsters voted against, will loom large over the election. To successfully win union representation elections, unions need to show that they are able to provide more than the status quo. If the union’s largest contract in the country — in this case, UPS — has starting wages 13 percent below what its non-union rival Amazon offers, the union’s ability to convince Amazon workers that they need to unionize to improve their position diminishes. (Overall, though, UPS offers workers a much better deal.) And given that UPS Teamsters perform very similar work to many Amazon workers — sorting, tracking, and delivering packages — the union needs rank-and-file UPS Teamsters to get involved in the organizing campaign to have any possibility of success. If Teamster members at UPS are too angry at the union for implementing an agreement a majority didn’t want, they’re less likely to become involved in a new organizing campaign at Amazon.

Shares of FedEx and United Parcel Service were on the move Monday after picking up upgrades from Wolfe Research analyst Scott Hand, who raised his ratings for both to the equivalent of Buy from Hold.

UPS (ticker: UPS) stock was up about 3.9% in midday trading. FedEx (FD) shares were up 3.5%. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, for comparison, are up 0.4% and 0.8% respectively.

Wall Street has been warming to both stocks as pricing and volumes for parcel shippers have risen throughout the pandemic. Detail’s of Hand’s upgrades weren’t available.

A FedEx and UPS driver both helped out two elderly people while they were out delivering this week, but neither driver knew their acts of kindness were caught on camera.

A Fox 2 viewer sent in a photo of a UPS Driver pushing a man in a powered wheelchair on the sidewalk this week. We posted it on Facebook and asked if the community could help us identify the kind UPS driver. FOX2’s viewers did more than that, they helped find the driver and shared another photo of a FedEx driver performing another kind act.

“I just did what any other person would do,” UPS Driver Patricia Hall-Hill said.